Item - The Terrorist Trap

Overall, this was a fun book, although in some instances you come out with success, yet aren't told everything that happened. And in spite of all of this, you never truly find out why your "uncle" did what he did. Still, the storyline is fun, and full of surprises and random twists. I think it's one of the better books.

More reviews by Countersound

Your brother, a reporter, leaves a note for you indicating that he's on the trail of a potentially dangerous story, and that if he isn't home by 6, to call the police.

Police decline to get involved, and you wind up teaming up with another reporter to find your brother and unravel what he was researching.

The story mostly focuses on some nuclear detonators that are being smuggled out of the country.

The writing is decent, and the structure is interesting enough. Most of the paths are fleshed out enough. But the story suffers from internal inconsistency. Sometimes that isn't a big issue, but it's a glaring problem with this story.

Depending on your choices, your brother can be in one of many places. The smuggler can be taking a plane or a train.

But there are a few internal consistencies that are pleasant. The overall plot is consistent. Your uncle has a role in the story, and that remains the same.

Not a bad book, but not terribly exciting. I'm not sure why that is.

More reviews by Jordashebasics

Ringing in at no. 119, The Terrorist Trap is an interesting bit of teenage crime fiction that starts off all narrative eventualities in this book by having you search for your missing brother, Kyle. Your pursuits in the various branching storylines bring you across a medley of different groups of characters and, ultimately, your trials, tribulations, and travails can lead you to either finding your brother and thwarting the terrorists, dying gruesomely, or something in between.

The novel establishes early on that your aunt Lorraine has been your and Kyle’s legal guardian ever since your parents died in a head-on car collision when you were very young. It is also establishes that Donald Hemdale, your deceased father’s ultra-wealthy best friend, financially augments your lifestyle. Donald Hemdale is close enough to the family whereby you and Kyle call him “Uncle Don.” I initially couldn’t help but wonder why Shannon Gilligan chose, what is by gamebook standards, such an unusual domestic setting for your character but, at some point, after getting through a few of the endings, I realized that this household arrangement, for reasons that are outside of the scope of this review, bore quite some utility to the overarching narrative.

The fundamental premise of this book is that your older brother Kyle, a rookie reporter for the Baltimore Times, has stumbled onto an intriguing story about certain irregularities at Uncle Don’s company, Protonix Industries, which—among other things, it turns out—secretly manufactures nuclear detonators. Following this lead, Kyle eventually manages to land himself in severe danger after discovering that Uncle Don has illegally sold two nuclear detonators to Middle Eastern terrorists through his contacts in the Baltimore Outfit of the Italian-American Mafia. Anticipating life-threatening danger, Kyle confides in you to seek him out should he disappear.

You have the wonderful Lauren, another junior reporter at the Baltimore Times, as an almost constant companion throughout the book who you meet when you go to Kyle’s office searching for clues regarding his whereabouts. Lauren immediately comes across as a likeable, trustworthy, and caring character. I suspect that this is at least partly due to the reader unconsciously associating Lauren with your aunt (i.e., with your caregiver and mother figure) because the two names are aural anagrams. I can’t be sure whether Shannon Gilligan deliberately did this out of her knowledge of audience psychology or if it was just fortuitous happenstance but the point to absorb is that the book, whether by accident or design, contains a clever psychological device to compel a specific unconscious reaction in readers.

Another observation regarding names in this book that stands out is that this book is, insofar as my knowledges goes, the only Choose Your Own Adventure book in which you are given a surname, Maclean (pg. 76). I have read plenty of gamebooks and I don’t think I’ve ever come across another Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook in which you learn either your first or last name. If there are any out there then please, do tell.

In any event, after teaming with Lauren at Kyle’s office, you are presented three avenues, only two of which spawn all of the consequent offshoots; you can:

1. Explore Harriman Import and Export’s warehouse on the dockyard;
2. Explore the Maria Antonie, a Bulgarian cargo ship due for London in a matter of hours, or;
3. Call Kyle’s friend, Harold, who is likely to have useful intel regarding the ongoing conspiracy because of his employment under a Senator in Washington, D.C.

Of the foregoing, the third branch ends up being nothing other than a meaningless, brief detour because it almost immediately loops back into the other two mother branches. After completing this book, my speculation is that Shannon Gilligan clearly had plans to develop this storyline but completely abandoned this story prong upon realizing that she would exceed the book’s recommended length after having already written a chunk of it. It would be unfortunate planning on the author’s part if this were truly the case because I would have loved the infusion of political thriller in this gamebook especially since the reader is made aware that someone inside the Pentagon is colluding with Uncle Don (pgs. 49 and 102). So, I definitely feel this lost opportunity could have been prevented by the author with some advanced refinement of the outline.

The Terrorist Trap is a book that is very much of its time; it was released in 1991 according to the copyright page. Because of the imagery it conjures in the mind, it is not at all hard to imagine some variation of this teenage crime fiction to have made it to the silver screen back in the late 80s or early 90s with someone like Christian Slater or Matthew Broderick playing your character and someone like Elizabeth Shue playing Lauren’s. Notwithstanding the generally more innocent tone of movies from that era, The Terrorist Trap—due to its narrative involving Baltimore policemen and homicide detectives, journalists, longshoremen, organized crime, and corrupt, influential men of industry and politics—also reminded me of HBO’s sleeper hit TV show The Wire in many respects.

This book does a good job of balancing narrative consistency with sufficient variation in its tertiary storylines. The various endings run the gamut of you being murdered by terrorists, murdered by the Mafiosi, arrested on suspicion of murder, successfully thwarting the terrorists, or inheriting Uncle Don’s Empire after he commits suicide. While some of this is undoubtedly heavy sledding for a fledgling mind, it is, at least in my opinion, a good fictional introduction to the realities of life that a younger reader is bound to face in the near to intermediate future.

Though entertaining, this is only a slightly better-than-average entry into the series. I can’t think of any instance wherein I was captivated by the suspense, intrigue, or action offered by this book. The overall quality of the book was definitely raised a notch by Frank Bolle’s illustrations which were, as usual, consistently superlative. I don’t think illustrators get nearly the credit they deserve, which is unfortunate considering they are almost equally as responsible as the author in bringing the story to life. I recommend picking up a copy for your reading pleasure as long as one can be found under $15, including shipping.

Rating: 6.0/10.0.

More reviews by tonylachief